She was a professional waitress for more than four decades, an avid reader of philosophy and poetry, and a collector of first-edition books. She also enjoyed the opera and theater. Although her waitress salary didn't allow for such luxuries, kind patrons often gave her tickets.

"These events were at night, and she worked nights," said daughter Charlene Bell of Apopka. "So she'd come get me, put on a dark gray London Fog coat she had, slap some lipstick on and go to the shows in her waitress uniform."

Bell, 84, died Tuesday of congestive heart failure.

She was born in Louisiana and moved to Central Florida in 1956, when she was 30. She worked at the Beacon Inn in Maitland and the Jamaica Inn in Orlando. She also worked at Anderson's Restaurant in Winter Park for 15 years. All of these establishments have since closed their doors.

Bell ended her career at age 66 after working the overnight shift at Denny's on Lee Road. At the end of her workday, Bell could recite where each of her customers sat and what they ate.

"She took pride in providing a fine-dining experience even if the establishment wasn't a fine-dining restaurant," Charlene Bell said.

Bell's daughter and others tried to persuade her to go into management in the restaurant business, thinking that it was more fitting for her intellectual abilities.

But she loved talking to the patrons and discussing politics, the arts and philosophy writers such as Ayn Rand and Khalil Gibran with the local intellectuals of the time.

"She had regular customers who were college professors, students, artists," Charlene Bell said. "She immensely enjoyed exchanging ideas with them. They turned her on to authors, books and she did the same."

Among the first-edition books in her library, Bell had 19th-century books by American writer Edgar Allan Poe and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In the 1960s, after segregation was outlawed, some of Bell's colleagues at Anderson's Restaurant refused to wait on black customers. She went against her peers and waited on African Americans, her daughter said.

This often meant waiting on tables outside her work station, which led to arguments about tips: The waitresses whose tables she had to pick up wanted to keep the money. Bell fought and won.

A highlight of Bell's career was when one of her regulars, a pastor from a black church in Eatonville, sent for her in a limousine after she said she would like to attend one of his worship services.

"She absolutely enjoyed it," her daughter said.

In addition to her daughter, Bell is survived by son Gerald A. Clark Jr. of Charlotte, N.C., 11 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.